A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  This anti-fascist centralisation could have been achieved by drawing the committees together. There were coordinating committees of anti-fascist militias in many localities. But there was no establishment of an all-Spanish committee of militias and workers’ delegates comparable to the Russian soviets of 1917.

  The reason for this failing lay in the politics of the workers’ organisations. The most powerful, the anarcho-syndicalists, had always insisted that any centralisation of power would involve a crushing of the workers by a new state. It would be wrong to follow this path now, they said. In the words of one of their leaders, Santillan, ‘Dictatorship was the liquidation of libertarian communism, which could only be achieved by the liberty and spontaneity of the masses’. 221 Rather than go along that path, they argued for leaving Companys’s government intact and collaborating with it. Even the ablest and most militant of the CNT leaders, Buenaventura Durutti – who had been involved in two unsuccessful risings against republican governments – did not dispute this logic. He had played a decisive role in crushing the fascists in Barcelona, was the hero of the city’s workers, and was to lead an impromptu workers’ army of tens of thousands which swept across the Catalan border into Aragon and towards the fascist-held city of Saragossa. But he was not prepared to confront the question of power, and left his CNT colleagues free to share it with Companys’s bourgeois government.

  The Catalan CNT did create a partial ‘counter-power’ to the government. It formed a central militia committee made up of representatives from itself, the UGT, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the dissident communist POUM, the Rabassaires peasant organisation and Companys’s party. This coordinated the military struggle in the region and was the focus for workers’ aspirations. But as it was made up of parties rather than workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ delegates it was an imperfect expression of those aspirations. And it consciously left decisions over other important questions, particularly finance and the banks, with Companys’s government.

  The Socialist Party and UGT leaders were the main influence on the workers’ movement in Madrid, and the armed militia owing allegiance to them was soon as much in control of that city as the CNT was in Barcelona. But for all the talk of Caballero being the ‘Spanish Lenin’, his supporters made no moves to establish a structure of workers’ power. The entire history of their organisation had involved working to exert pressure within the institutions of existing society. They were terrified of any elected delegate structure which might allow the anarchists to exert pressure on the rank and file of their own organisations. The right inside the Socialist Party urged immediate compromise with the bourgeois republicans. The left, led by Caballero, were not happy about this, remembering how unsuccessful their past collaborations with the republicans had been. But the left had no other answer to the question of how to create a centralised authority to counter the fascist armies’ coordinated pincer movement towards Madrid.

  The Communist Party had been founded a decade and a half earlier to counter the lack of politics of the anarcho-syndicalists and the reformism of the Socialist Party. But successive expulsions had driven from the party any leaders who might question the line coming from Stalin in Moscow. And that line was now to promote a Popular Front with the bourgeois republicans. While the CNT and the Socialist Party left dithered over what to do about the government, the Communist Party and the Russian ambassador urged them to join a coalition government, abjure talk of revolution and restrict themselves to purely republican anti-fascist policies. They argued this would win the support of the middle classes, stop other capitalists and landowners going over to the fascists, and be looked on favourably by the French and British governments. It would also be able to unite the members of the various militias into a single, centralised army under the command of those professional officers who had stuck by the republic.

  Such a government was eventually formed at the beginning of September. Caballero was prime minister, but the majority of its members were republicans or right-wing socialists. Its slogan was, ‘First win the war, then talk about the revolution.’ It was an approach the CNT leaders could not resist for much longer than the left Socialists. Soon three of them had joined Companys’s government in Catalonia, to be followed by four taking ministerial posts in Madrid.

  The left Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists believed that by postponing completion of the revolution they would be able both to hang on to the gains workers had already made and win the war by cementing the support of the moderate republicans. But this was just not possible. What the moderate republicans wanted most of all was respect for private property and the maintenance, without any revolutionary tampering, of those sections of the state machine which remained on the side of the republic. They saw rebuilding the prestige of the ‘republican’ army officers and police chiefs as their ultimate protection against social revolution.

  However, respect for private property and maintenance of the old state machine in Spain in the autumn of 1936 did not mean merely restraining workers from struggle. It meant somehow – by persuasion or force – making workers surrender the gains they had made and give up control of the factories and estates they had taken over in July. It meant taking arms away from the workers who had stormed the barracks in July and handing them back to officers who had sat on the fence.

  The Communist Party functionaries and right-wing Socialists argued that any attempts by workers to make social revolution would mean a second civil war within the republican side. Yet their efforts to force workers to abandon their social conquests created precisely the elements of such a civil war.

  It was they, not the anarchists or the extreme left POUM, who withdrew soldiers and arms from the front for internal use. It was they who initiated fighting when workers refused to leave collectivised property or obey the orders of the refurbished bourgeois state. It was they who began armed clashes that cost hundreds of lives in Barcelona in May 1937, when they insisted on trying to seize the city telephone building that the CNT militia had conquered from the fascists nine and a half months earlier. And it was they who unleashed police terror against the left which involved the murder of leaders like Andrés Nin and the imprisonment of thousands of anti-fascist militants. There was no other way a militant working class could be forced to abandon its revolution and wait for ‘the end of the war’.

  Yet the sacrifices imposed on workers did not win the war, any more than those imposed by social democratic governments in Germany, Austria or France stopped the advance of fascism. Every concession made to the bourgeois parties in republican Spain played into Franco’s hands.

  A typical pattern developed when the republican towns were hard-pressed. The workers, who had everything to lose by Franco taking the towns, were prepared to fight to the end. But the propertied middle classes, if they did not positively welcome the fascist victory, believed they could arrange a compromise for themselves. Thus when the Basque bourgeoisie abandoned San Sebastian, it ensured militants belonging to the CNT could not continue the struggle. It waged a civil war within a civil war, shooting ‘looters’ and ‘incendiaries’ to protect property, and leaving armed guards patrolling the streets to ensure the city was handed over intact to Franco. The same pattern was repeated in Bilbao, Santander and Gijon. 222 Elsewhere, officers who had been promoted to positions of command by the government went over to the fascists at key moments. In the last days of the war a junta of republican generals seized power in Madrid with the hope of discussing a ‘peaceful surrender’ with Franco, and 2,000 died in the fighting.

  The concessions to bourgeois respectability took their toll in other ways. Almost the whole of the Spanish fleet had imprisoned its officers and opposed the fascist uprising in July 1936. This presented a difficult obstacle to Franco, who was attempting to move the bulk of his army from Morocco to the Spanish mainland. But, in pursuit of Anglo-French support, the governments of Giral and Caballero ordered the fleet away from Tangiers and ended its interference with Franco’
s lines of communication. The same reasoning prevented any attempt to foment rebellion behind Franco’s lines by giving a guarantee of independence to Morocco. The Spanish army had been battered by anti-colonial risings in the 1920s and the chances of forging a new struggle were high. Instead the Popular Front governments preferred to seek Anglo-French favour by offering those powers concessions in a Spanish-ruled Morocco.

  Yet the attempts to placate the Great Powers achieved nothing. Britain and France refused to supply the republic with arms, even though Germany and Italy were giving massive backing to Franco.

  The search for respectability also meant the republic had little to offer the small peasants who had misguidedly volunteered to fight for Franco and the large numbers of workers stranded in his zone, including those in traditionally militant places such as Seville, Oviedo and Saragossa. One of the most astonishing features of the war was how little trouble Franco faced from the populations he had subdued – a marked contrast to what had happened behind the front lines of the White armies in the Russian civil war.

  The most energetic force on the left pushing the anti-revolutionary policy was the Communist Party. Its core membership did not do this out of a desire to advance in existing society, even if the party did recruit large numbers of middle-class people who were motivated in this way. The core was made up of dedicated and courageous people who identified with Russia and accepted the Stalinist argument that it was ‘impractical’ to push for revolution. So, while opposing revolutionary demands, they fought with revolutionary enthusiasm in defence of Madrid in the autumn of 1936, using the language of class to mobilise workers. But the enthusiasm and the language were still tied to a policy as fatal as that followed by social democrats elsewhere in Europe. By crushing the revolution in its stronghold, Barcelona, in May 1937 they also made it much more difficult to fight fascism. They paid the price when Franco was able to march unopposed into Barcelona in January 1939 and the republican generals turned against the Communists in Madrid a few weeks later.

  There are those who question the use of the term ‘fascist’ to describe Franco’s forces. Even Eric Hobsbawm claims, ‘General Franco cannot … be described as a fascist.’ They focus on the difference between his ‘movement’ and the Italian fascists and German Nazis. The attempt to create a totalitarian mass party along fascist lines, the Falange, was only one component, they point out. The movement also comprised old-style monarchists, generals who merely wanted the kind of coup ( pronunciamento ) which had been common in the previous century, conservative landowners, devotees of the church, and the ‘Carlist’ small farmers of Navarre whose ideals harked back to the days of the Inquisition.

  This argument fails because it neglects the process of ‘combined and uneven development’ explained by Trotsky. Spain in the 1930s was a backward country with a backward landowning class, a backward capitalist class, a backward military and a backward church. But it was also an integral part of the modern capitalist world, with centres of advanced industry and a powerful, if relatively small, working class capable of using the most up-to-date and revolutionary forms of struggle. The archaic ruling class and middle class reacted by adopting up-to-date forms of counter-revolutionary struggle. In 1934 this meant attempting to copy the ‘clerico-fascism’ of Dollfuss, and in the revolutionary year of 1936 it meant a move towards the thoroughgoing fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. The copy was not exact, moulding together different traditions and different propertied classes, large and small. But what resulted was a genuine mass movement capable of doing what no military coup had done before – not merely defeating the opposition, but destroying the basic organisational networks of the workers’ movement. The number of people estimated to have been executed in the wake of Franco’s victory is around half a million. A greater number went into exile. For more than two decades, no open expression of liberal, let alone socialist, ideas was possible. Not until the early 1960s was there a recovery of the workers’ movement. Those who threw up barricades on 18–19 July 1936 were right to see what they were fighting as ‘fascism’. The middle-class politicians who believed conciliation was possible, as it had been with past monarchist governments and military pronunciamentos , were fundamentally mistaken.

  Chapter 8

  Midnight in the century

  Midnight in the Century was the title Victor Serge gave to the novel he published in 1939. It expressed his feelings about what he had seen happen to the hopes of his life, and to those of humanity as a whole.

  Serge had been imprisoned as an anarchist in France before the First World War, taken part in the rising workers’ movement in Barcelona, and then travelled to Russia to put his services at the disposal of the revolutionary government, working for the Communist International in Germany in 1923. On returning to Russia he had joined the opposition to Stalinism in the mid-1920s and as a result spent three years in the early gulag system. He was able to escape Russia just before the bloodletting of the mid-1930s thanks to the efforts of left-wing intellectuals in France like André Malraux, but left many friends and comrades behind to face torture and execution. Other friends and comrades were in the hands of Hitler’s Gestapo and also faced torture and execution. In Spain Serge’s friend Joaquín Maurín was serving a 20-year sentence in one of Franco’s jails and another, Andrés Nin, also a member of the POUM, was murdered by Stalin’s agents in Barcelona. Totalitarianism of one sort or another was spreading right across Europe.

  Serge was not alone in having to confront this frightful reality. Many thousands of people who had fought for a better world found themselves trapped by the machinations of rival states: German Communists were handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin’s police in 1940; Polish Jews fled eastwards from advancing German troops in 1939 only to be imprisoned in the Russian gulag; refugees from Nazi Germany were interned as possible spies in Britain; soldiers escaping from republican Spain were thrown into concentration camps in republican France; Russian advisers to the Spanish republic were executed on their return to Moscow as ‘fascist agents’.

  As a living reminder of the revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky epitomised everything that governments of every sort hated. He was exiled to Turkey by Stalin, and expelled from France by a Radical government and from Norway by a social democratic one. His daughter was driven to commit suicide in Berlin in the last weeks before the Nazi takeover. One son died in the gulag , and another was poisoned by a Stalinist agent in Paris. Trotsky himself was to be murdered by an agent of Stalin in Mexico in 1940. For him the ‘symmetry’ between Nazism and Stalinism was all too plain – the monolithic ruling party, the show trials, the secret police, the vast concentration camps, and the denial of any space for independent thought or independent artistic expression.

  Yet he dissented from the view, fashionable today, that Stalinism and Nazism were essentially the same – a view which can easily slide over into a virtual apology for the Nazis on the grounds that they were ‘no worse’ than those who fought them on the streets of Germany or Spain. 223 The ‘symmetrical’ political structures, Trotsky argued, presided over different social contents.

  He believed the difference lay in the USSR still being somehow a ‘workers’ state’, albeit ‘bureaucratically degenerated’, because industry was nationalised. This part of his argument did not hold water. If workers did not control the political structures – and Trotsky rightly insisted they did not – then they were in no sense the ‘owners’ of industries run by those structures. They were just as exploited as workers anywhere else in the world. The revolution of 1917 had been murdered politically and economically.

  However, this does not mean he was wrong to insist on a difference between Stalinism and Nazism. Stalinist state capitalism was constructed by a new ruling class in a backward country which, desperate to match the economic and military power of its more advanced rivals, concentrated into a short period all the horrors of the ‘primitive capital accumulation’ which had accompanied the rise of capitalism. That is why it enslaved, execu
ted, imprisoned, deported and starved people. This was the rational core of Stalin’s paranoia and barbarity.

  Nazism, by contrast, was the product of an already mature industrial capitalism. The German ruling class saw the only way to escape from a deep economic crisis was to hand political power to a totalitarian movement based on the irrational fantasies of a middle class driven mad by the crisis. This process culminated, in the midst of the Second World War, in the ‘Final Solution’ – the use of the most advanced industrial techniques to systematically wipe out millions of people simply because of their supposed ethnic identity. Stalin placed millions in labour camps, where about one in ten were worked to death. Hitler had similar camps, but alongside these – and on an even greater scale – he set up death camps in which millions were simply gassed. Both engaged in barbarity, but they were different sorts of barbarity, corresponding to different stages in capitalist development. Millions suffered under the national chauvinism and anti-Semitism to which Stalin resorted to bolster his rule, but the majority survived to talk about it. Few of the millions of Jews and Gypsies who suffered under Hitler survived. The word ‘genocide’ fits the second case, not the first.

  Of course, this did not make any difference to those who died. But it did have wider implications, especially for those who supported the rival ideologies elsewhere in the world. The core of the Nazi movement was made up of people who enthused at its barbaric features, its racist and genocidal fantasies, and its worship of ‘blood and honour’. The core of the Stalinist movements in the West and the Third World was made up of people who tried to hide from themselves its reliance on totalitarianism and its willingness to resort to chauvinism and anti-Semitism. They identified with Russia because they wanted something better than the inhumanity of capitalism and were convinced that these things existed in Russia.